All posts tagged ‘School district’

Over at Motion Math Games, a developer GeekDad has long admired for bringing math to kinesthetic learners, they have put their app where more apps should be – under the researcher’s microscope. They invested their own funds and partnered with the GameDesk Institute to have a look at the real educational value of the iPad and their app and whether it indeed supports and improves children’s ability to learn math, specifically fractions, which their Motion Math app is based on.

There is a lot of anecdotal evidence about the value of the iPad, many would say so overwhelming that the significant investment being made by School Districts into mobile technologies and tablets isn’t worthwhile. But, without any decent research or proven randomized trials to demonstrate the educational effectiveness, anyone making claims about the huge educational benefits of certain technologies, apps or other new product is not doing it based on any rigor or serious testing. So, it is heartening to see at least this developer recognizing the importance of putting their money behind some work to try to establish whether there is educational value behind not just what they are doing, but what we are all doing as our children move into a world of mobile technologies.

The value of such research is not really in the final percentage breakdowns listing the achievements of children and whether they have benefited or not from using an app or a piece of mobile technology. The real value is understanding the nuances and grappling with questions that app developers in this space should be tackling like:

What aspects of the design contribute to improved learning?

How do children engage with the tools as learning devices and what can we learn from this in improving our development?

Is it the app itself that supports learning, or the nature of the device, or a combination – and what is that combination and how can we better use it to improve learning?